The answer is not far to seek. One leading peculiarity of Rousseau, the great prophet of sentimentalism, is that exaltation of the immediate sensation at the expense of hard realities which is the mark of all sentimentalism. He can enjoy intensely, but cannot restrain a single impulse with a view to future enjoyment. He can sympathise keenly with immediate sufferings, but shrinks from admitting that indulgence may be the worst cruelty. His only rule of life is to give free play to his impulses. All discipline is tyranny. Education is to consist in stimulating the emotions at the expense of the reason. And, therefore, facts in general are on the whole objectionable and inconvenient things. Your practical man is merely a wheel in a gigantic machinery, for ever grinding out barren results and never leaving himself time for the pure happiness of feeling. He would abolish space and time to make one dreamer happy. Dreamland is the only true reality. There facts conform to feeling instead of crushing it out of existence. There we can be optimists; see virtue rewarded, simplicity honoured, genius appreciated, and the substance of happiness pursued instead of its idle shadows—external show, and hard-won triumphs that pall in the fruition. Nothing is more characteristic of this tendency than the passage in which he describes the composition of the 'Nouvelle Héloïse.' The impossibility, he says, of grasping realities cast him into the land of chimeras: seeing nothing in existence which was worthy of his delirium, he nourished it in an ideal world which his creative imagination soon peopled with beings after his own heart. He was in love—not with an external object, but with love itself; he formed out of his passionate longings those beautiful, unreal, highstrung beings, whose ecstasies and agonies kept fine ladies sitting up all night in forgetfulness of balls and assemblies, and which now, alas! have faded, as unreal things are apt to fade, and become rather wearisome and slightly absurd. Facts revenge themselves upon the man who denies their existence; and poor Rousseau did not escape the inevitable Nemesis. His follies and his crimes sprang from this fatal habit of sacrificing everything to the immediate impulse; his reveries seduced him into the region of downright illusions; and his optimism—by a curious, but not uncommon inversion—became the strongest proof of his actual misery. He found realities so painful that he swore that they must be dreams; as dreams were so sweet, that they must be the true realities. 'All men are born free,' as he says in his famous sentence; 'and men are everywhere in chains.' That is the true Rousseau logic. Everything must be right in some transcendental sense, because in an actual sense everything is wrong. We say that men take a cheerful or a doleful view of the universe according to the state of their own livers; but sometimes the reverse seems to hold good. It requires, it would seem,